On Physiognomy
March 09 2024
I think at one point I planned on writing these posts much more frequently, and now it's already March. Oops.
Well, here's what actually happened. I started writing and realized, ah hell, I need to be reading more, actually. You get a little spoiled in grad school where you're able to be constantly reading and talking about what you're reading vs when you work 9 to 5 and have to actually like, make time or whatever. I'm writing this now because I do want part of this blog to be about documenting process, not just ideas.
I think one thing I want to do is start ... ugh... doing annotated bibliography entries. And maybe that'll be interesting to someone who stumbles on this blog? Not that it really matters, I'm not doing this for an audience per se. Besides uh, my chair. Hi Dr. G!
Anyway anyway. What I actually wanted to jot down was some thoughts on physiognomy. Cathy and I talked about physiognomy on the podcast, you can find that episode here: Drawing a Dialogue ep. 12: Racism and Physiognomy in Cartooning. Basically, physiognomy is a cousin of phrenology, the idea that you can discern a person's Inner Moral Character by their facial features, which then bled into ideas about how to illustrate in drawing a character or person's moral character. I spent some time at work digging around for writing about physiognomy and how-to-draw books and surprisingly couldn't find much on the latter. Or like..writing about how to draw books in general. Which is so surprising to me! I'm sure it exists out there and I'm just not aware of it? But anyway, I'm increasingly fascinated by the long-lasting influence of physiognomy. I think how to draw books would probably be the easiest way to trace that influence, not because how to draw books are, hm, I don't think how to draw books inform current trends, but I think current trends inform how to draw books. And there's so many...like so many how to draw books have different sections for "women" and "men" and suppose that there are specific visual cues you need to learn to "properly" draw a woman vs a man. And I'm thinking mostly about cartooning/comic how to draw books though I'm sure more fine art/figure oriented ones have traces too. But caricature, man. There's an obvious racialized element that Cathy & I discussed and that I think has gotten more scholarly attention, let's say, like, look at our citations in the link above. But in terms of depicting gender ... I just think its interesting and I think a lot of physignomical assumptions undergird carcicature and animation still. Like the idea of fatness being either "this character is happy" or "this character is morally corrupt" (but in either case fatness MUST be a signifier of an INTERNAL moral trait). Or the idea that women always have to have full lips, which is so commonplace it's a bit of a meme (think of the damn cars in pixar's CARS!!)
I want to chase this because I want to develop a visual history of gender nonconformity - what indicators are used to depict nonconformity and how they've evolved/stayed the same. I have hypotheses about this just from being a person in the world who has look at images but I want to look at MORE images. I'm also focusing specifically on non-conformity over transness since really the idea of transness as a coherent, representable thing is, I think, fairly new still, not because trans people didnt exist or whatever but you know, language/identity politics evolve over time. I mean hell look at Grewal's writing about how British women defined their gender through the construction of Indian women as non-women - gender nonconformity defined through proximity to Whiteness/the metropole. ..I should re-read Grewal actually it's been a hot minute. More to come?